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The development of a scale measuring consumer confidence in buying decisions

The plethora of diverse conceptualisations and operationalizations of confidence apparent in the literature suggests a gap in empirical endeavour in developing an established research methodology to create valid and reliable measures of confidence. This research seeks to create a 'consumer confidence in buying-decisions' scale regarding high-involvement products and/or services where consumer confidence is re-defined as anticipated certainty of past patterns recurring in future events, episodes and/or behaviours. This research also incorporates this new definition of confidence into the item generation methodology via a triangulation of qualitative and quantitative methods. This research is comprised of two distinct components. The first is a theoretical component, which examines the nature of consumer confidence in buying-decisions. Specifically, using established procedures from the measure development literature, a total of five instruments were derived employing extensive qualitative and quantitative research capturing consumers' confidence levels in their buying-decisions. The psychometric properties of dimensionality, reliability, and validity were confirmed through rigorous statistical analyses. The qualitative analyses were conducted on the data obtained from two focus groups, an experimental procedure followed by individual semi-structured interviews, and two review procedures. The second component is the quantitative approach that was used with self-administered surveys distributed to 421 Swansea university students (development sample), 33 Swansea university students (test-retest analysis) as part of the development stage of the consumer confidence in buying-decisions scale. The quantitative approach also involved the collection of self-administered surveys from a stratified sample of 311 non-student adults in Swansea area and from 36 couples (convergent validation). Exploratory and confirmatory analyses were conducted during both the development and the validation stages of the research to ensure the scale's reliability, convergent, discriminant and relative predictive validity and nomological validity. Those analyses were conducted to extend the current bank of knowledge in the confidence field while also ensuring the reliability and the validity of the consumer confidence in buying-decisions that was developed in this dissertation. The dissertation concludes with a discussion of the theoretical and managerial implications underpinning consumer confidence and related issues, as well as suggestions for further research.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:644357
Date January 2013
CreatorsYeniaras, Volkan
PublisherSwansea University
Source SetsEthos UK
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation

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